For my audio-book, I chose the BBC recordings of Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Besides being one of my favorite works of fiction (and thus being a text I was already familiar with and able to easily procure), I wanted to work with this novel due to the unique relationship between this rendition and the text. Unlike other audio-books, this recording predates its (re)incarnation as a material book; Adams had originally written The Hitchhiker’s Guide as a script for a radio play before writing the novel. A ‘reading’ of the original BBC play offered an uncommon opportunity: rather than seeing the audio in light of the text, which was my basis of criticism last week, I would be able to experience the reverse and see the effects of an ‘reading’ originating in audio. Or, to use the words of this week’s reading, the text itself would be seen as a “…a new edition, direct from the author…” (Rubery 68) in light of the original audio.

The aspect of the audio recording that featured prominently in my ‘reading’ was its treatment of narrative voice. While the BBC was able to procure multiple talented actors capable of modulating their voice to distinguish character, the sheer amount of parts required for the performance inevitably produced redundancies in timbre. To establish exactly when the actual narrator was speaking, a musical effect was played in tandem with narration. When contrastedagainst the text, an interesting consequence of audio mediums appears. When reading, we are conditioned to accept the narrator’s voice as the default while actual character voice must be set apart. One can see this in the use of quotation marks: we reserve their use for actual character dialogue and refrain from inserting them when the text is providing description and narration. Excluding works that involve stream of consciousness and experimental techniques, we typically need to distinguish moments of characters speaking against a default of narrative voice.

For the audio performance, this was reversed; the voice of character was assumed to be the default while the narrative voice required a musical motif to indicate its identity. When I failed to notice this audio cue, I found myself confused, having difficulty parsing the narrative voice among that of other actors. Though this may be a result of the exact genre of audio recording (i.e. radio play), it appears as though the use of auditory mediums create a centrifugal expectation of language. As we are accustomed to auditory inputs originating from a multiplicity of sources, we are less conditioned to accept an authoritative voice unless we are given a priming signal to prepare ourselves. It is reminiscent of Bakhtinian heteroglossia: the voice of the author becomes subsumed by the voices of individual characters, creating a Saturnalia effect in dialogue.

This facet of narrative voice becomes more significant when the radio play and the text are compared for fidelity. Even with a cursory comparison, it is obvious that there are multiple differences between the text and original. Several jokes have been replaced with new ones (likely born from a desire to distinguish the two mediums for marketing purpose) and there are multiple editorial revisions to streamline narrative. However, I find the most significant alteration to be the insertion of several paragraphs of narration. Simple descriptions of movement and scenery were created in the act of novelization that are noticeably different in purpose and tone than the original narrative descriptions from the play. One is given the sense of two narrators co-existing in the novel: the original narrator and the novelic narrator. It appears as though Adams doubted the reader’s imaginative ability to carry over from the play and needed to supplement his original writing. If so, one becomes curious as to whether this was a valid concern and ponders the exact quality that causes this variance across mediums.

This observation must be coupled with noting how the play treats the narrative voice as a character. In the actual credits for the recording, one notes that the actor serving in the narrative role is credited as “the book” aka the eponymous guide of the novel. Whenever a character seeks to ascertain knowledge from the guide, the narrative voice will speak as the guide itself, implying for the listener that all narration is actually “the book” speaking to them. In effect, it gives the sensation that the narrator is yet another character, an individual participant in a free exchange of voices that directs the audio’s narrative. In Adam’s alteration of this voice in his novelization to one of conventional narration, there appears to be a doubt towards the feasibility of such ‘democratic’ use of voice, an impulse suggesting the need for a less egalitarian narrative to facilitate the text.

The articles we read for today seem to come together under the shared basis that readings of literature are unified in the 21st century through collaboration, and through writing on top of/alongside them. It shifts our understanding of how the reading (as opposed to writing) side of the texts is examined when we transition for being witnesses of texts to acting, instead, as participants with them. I mentioned in class that I was interested in Liu’s evocation of “margins” when discussing DH close/distant reading practices, and how it evoked the image of writing on the text, of navigating websites, etc. He says:

“all the new decentralizing literary-critical approaches I mention above [are] skewed into a new social geometry by adding what can be generalized as a margin. In various ways, for example, deconstruction, cultural criticism, and the field of the history of the book defined marginal zones of literary activity that renegotiated the roles of literary sociality.”

In this sense, writing in the margin of a text becomes a genre in and of itself, where it is shaped both by the content and context of a text, but also by the presence of the margin itself. I am most interested though in how the thought of the “margin” or of “margins” affects our visualization of texts through DH as well.

On a basic level, interpreting texts on a screen, on a page, through audio, associate a clear understanding of how we look (or don’t) and interact with a text based on visual queues. The margin on a page is different than the margin created when using hypohes.is, but it is a margin nonetheless. We have a meta-experience of this while reading the Liu and Kirschenbaum pieces as the commentary is embedded alongside the text, implanting the discourse around the theory within the article itself. It does not ask permission to do this either; I found myself frustrated with the MLA annotation format—it would scroll back to the top of a paragraph and pull up comments alongside it if I attempted to highlight one sentence—whereas while the Debates in DH software wasn’t so aggressive in terms of implanting the commentary within the structure, it still forced visual queues into the reading to alert readers to the conversation, or to sentences which were given attention by previous readers. In one sense, this feels like a sort of cheat code by enabling efficient skimming, but it also gives the reader no choice but to concern herself with the conversations going on around the text.  It goes against the grain of digital ephemera—I’m thinking of the endless feeds on twitter and threads on reddit, or listings on amazon with thousands of reviews—which ultimately  get swept up and away as newer thoughts/posts send them further back and out of consciousness. But more than that, it disrupts the normal methodology of reading, where we have thoughts at the forefront of our minds, but also sub-thoughts that are unarticulated but shape our perception or internal feeling towards a text (this isn’t something I read, but is more so an observation for my own reading habits, which I assume other people experience too.) The presence of a margin complicates the nature of literary conversation, because our thoughts in this context cannot exist as ephemera but as an essential, or at the very least, un-ignorable component of the writing. While the intention of this effect is to broaden and promote discussion, it seems actually to do the opposite: by filling the margins for you, it prevents you from filling them for yourself.

In Hayles’ example of playing texts through facebook, or even in our own class, the example of finding audiobooks “in the wild” and doing a textual analysis of them, we are forced to rethink the visual queue of the margin (Hayles, 196-197). Audiobooks typically lack any visual structure, besides maybe a thumbnail image to accompany it if it is digital. While the facebook example has its own host of digital queues,  the margin is not on the sides but within the framework of the text: in memes it is on an image itself, in posts it is in the reaction buttons, it is in the search bar, and in the comment feeds—which within the last year have incorporated the ability to create visual sub-threads within a given comment in a comment section. By eliminating the visual image of a margin, there is an actual opportunity to host new discourse, because that discourse isn’t confined to a space with which it has a mutualistic dictation (the margin exists to be written in, but it is only written in chiefly because it is there.) This reshapes the methodology of reading a given text. This ties back to the idea of ephemera and the hyper-attention of Hayles’ writing, by eliminating the traditional space to interact with the text, but rather than pushing the margins out further and making them inaccessible, the margins are eliminated almost entirely, and we are forced to annotate directly within the text itself—it is the creation of new, technological margins and, thus, social margins that are more similar to those of salons and coffee houses of pre-21^st century literary discourse (Bérubé, et. al. 423). In the long run, I wonder what this means for pedagogy and the future of close reading: would Hayles’ say that our margins are indicative of hyper- or deep-attention? Are margins both visually and analytically constrictive? If so, what do we do with them?

“The printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution” announced Matthew Kirschenbaum in DH Debates in 2012. Five years earlier, N. Katherine Hayles had observed that a generational shift in the way people produce, distribute and interpret knowledge was taking place and causing cognitive shift (“Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes”). The ubiquity of television, cell phones and computers in the United States and in Europe bear both Hayles and Kirschenbaum out, but digital technologies have replaced the printed word to a much lesser extent in more economically challenged hemispheres. In Colombia, for example, although television and cell phones are probably the main channels through which people consume current news, institutions of higher education and government agencies still rely heavily on the printed word. I understand therefore that Hayles and Kirschenbaum frame their posthuman subjects within geopolitical and socioeconomic boundaries particular to the technologically equipped world but do not specify these boundaries in the cognitive shifts they discuss.

In twenty-first century North America, technologically driven changes in modes of thought are most pronounced in the younger generations, wrote Hayles, predicting that the full effects of the “generational shift in cognitive styles,” would probably be felt when kids who were twelve in 2007 got to college (187). Eleven years later, these kids make up the most part of undergraduate classes in the United States today. To respond to the different approach to knowledge new generations of college students would take, Hayles warned that we needed to be aware of the shift that was taking place and devise new strategies appropriate to new cognitive styles (187). Have we done this? I think we can find some answers to this question in Cathy Davidson’s The New Education, which examines the forces that shaped North American higher education in response to the mechanized industrial revolutions of the 19^th century, argues that these educational methods/models no longer serve our transformed needs and calls for a revolution in our approach to teaching and learning.

Again, my mind goes to Universidad del Atlántico in Barranquilla, Colombia, where I taught for two years. Universidad del Atlántico is one of the largest public universities in the Caribbean, and it is overcrowded, underfunded, and low-tech. Most of its students are from the lowest economic “stratas” (Colombia has an institutionalized caste system allegedly based on the value of one’s home) any many do not have cell phones. Neither faculty nor students multitask like we do here. In the university the printed word – usually in photocopied books – is the main medium for knowledge production and distribution. Outside the university private television and radio stations dominate the information pond. The Colombian Ministry of Education is directing funds for technological development in public universities (sadly, a lot of this funding is stolen before it gets near where it should go) and private universities are investing heavily in technology, so I think we can safely say in Colombia too technology has caused and is causing generational cognitive shifts. As we devise new strategies for responding to the shifts we see in North America, we should also think of how such strategies can be implemented globally, in universities with very little means, and how we could help people with less means recycle hardware we no longer use.

Works Cited

Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in English Departments?” DH Debates, 2012

Katherine Hayles, “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” PMLA, 2007

Cathy N. Davidson. The New Education. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

So I have had some experience with Matthew Kirschenbaum’s work in the past, but only recently have been able to apply his theories in a practical way. In reading his article What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments? I have decided to use this blog post to not only address the hostility and retaliation towards the digital humanities (towards the beginning of its existence as we know it today) but also how English departments have grown to open their doors to it. As time has gone by, the digital humanities as a field have not stopped growing. The name for all of the subcategories within DH is “The Big Tent” because the boundaries are essentially non-existent. However, in the beginning, there was some serious pushback to accepting the digital humanities as a field of study within English departments and academia as a whole. People considered it to be an incredibly exclusive field, and I recently learned that  University of Nebraska scholar, Stephen Ramsay, had really scrambled the field when he made his “Who’s In and Who’s Out” speech at the Modern Language Association Convention in 2011 (Gold). If you would like more direct information on that, you can find it in the same book’s (Debates in the Digital Humanities by Matthew K. Gold) introduction. Anyway, Ramsay’s made that speech essentially saying that if you did not know how to code, then you were not ever going to be a digital humanist.

At the time, digital humanities were in the midst of a flurry due to that statement (amongst others). It really helped to promote this cliquish culture in DH, something that took a long time to overcome. Some may still be fighting it. The reason I brought up Ramsay and the start of digital humanities was because of how much of a boys club it once was and where we are now. Kirschenbaum lists half a dozen reason English departments were so compatible with DH. However, he doesn’t dive very deep into any of the points, which is why I want to interpret them and explain what they mean to me. Starting with his first point:

“First, after numeric input, text has been by far the most tractable data type for computers to manipulate. Unlike images, audio, video, and so on, there is a long tradition of text-based data processing that was within the capabilities of even some of the earliest computer systems and that has for decades fed research in fields like stylistics, linguistics, and author attribution studies, all heavily associated with English departments.” (Kirschenbaum) 

This first reason converges with his second point regarding computers and composition as well as his final point discussing e-reading. These three points can be brought together using a single word, archiving. A hefty motivator for students and professors of English to embrace this technological aspect of academia is the drive to digitize information and make it more accessible for curious minds. Look at the tragic loss in Rio, Brazil. They lost countless years of history and culture in one accident. As a result, they are trying to replicate the museum by digitizing it, archiving the data and mapping it out online so that their citizens and tourists can still have some kind of experience. I myself had the pleasure of working on an archive in undergrad when my professor, Dr. Annie Swafford, introduced us to DH. Working with Dickinson University, we created a Victorian Queer Literature archive for people all over to access online. This is where I first realized that this was something that could really connect people rather than keep them apart. Fields associated with text have so much potential in terms of technology, Kirschenbaum was well aware of that.

One last point I’ll unwrap was his fifth point where he stated: “Fifth is the openness of English departments to cultural studies, where computers and other objects of digital material culture become the centerpiece of analysis” (Kirschenbaum). I really enjoyed this point because from what I learned, English is a subject rooted in the human experience. Understanding stories of life through others’ experiences is what reading is about. So there is a very deep cultural aspect to English, something that we could use through our current and future technology to interconnect cultures and even academic disciplines. Technology is very much so a bridge between worlds that we can mold to bring everyone together rather than separated into cliques. Kirschenbaum saw this as an opportunity to use digital resources for reasons other than collecting data and analyzing statistics. For example, we can learn Brazilian culture through their digitized museum once it is complete. Ramsay may have had a point back in 2011, but the digital humanities have spread so widely across multiple disciplines. I feel as though Kirschenbaum was correct, but didn’t anticipate that English would act as a gateway like this way back in 2012.

*I apologize for the lack of page numbers! The Debates in the Digital Humanities online edition doesn’t have them to utilize.

Contributing to a blog has been a core requirement of all the classes I’ve taken so far at the Graduate Center.  So has following and reading various blogs.  I picked up early on how important blogs were to the digital humanities and my academic studies, and I recognize that they are an important tool for sharing and discussing ideas and having an online conversation around those ideas.  Nevertheless, it doesn’t come super easy to me and it’s not my favorite form of communication, but I will do my part to dispense my thoughts and to comment on those of my classmates.  I still relish the face to face discussion and sharing of ideas (thankfully, this class is taught in a classroom and not online).  Perhaps that’s my bias of age showing and I am resisting the “generational shift in cognitive styles” that has been hypothesized due to the rapid development of today’s “mediascape” as Hayles explores in the essay “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Mode” (p. 187).

I know for sure that I get super frustrated when my young nieces and nephews would rather play on their devices than read a good book, but I also know that being connected is an imperative in today’s world and they’d be somewhat at a disadvantage without access to networks and devices (I want them to prefer the solitary enjoyment of escaping into a good book over the rewards of beating their friend in a game of Fortnite, but I might be asking too much?).  What I really hope is that they are able to strike a balance in their development as citizens to be both able to deeply focus and to critically engage (with a book) while also navigating the constant bombardment of information from many directions and screens.  I use the word citizen intentionally here because I was particularly struck by the “Community Reading and Social Imagination” essay’s discussion of civil society and the role that community reading has played in ensuring a civil society.  The authors write:

In coming together to listen to, write, or discuss literature, we ideally develop and hone the skills (of listening to, evaluating, and critically engaging others’ arguments and articulating rhetorically effective positions of our own) that make civil society pleasurable and productive. (p.422)

This leads me to thinking about how some feel that the internet is the “great democratizer” of our time.  Web 2.0, as Liu introduced, allows anyone to be an author or creator or commentator or contributor (if any and all contribute, isn’t that the democratic ideal?).  We can now all come together and write, discuss, and listen online (given that we have internet access and a tool to write with).  Despite my reticence to blog, I still recognize it as a useful platform for communally participating and sharing ideas (although I will still prefer the in person discussion).  I’m not quite sure that the internet really is the great democratizer, but it definitely allows us to have more conversations and to write socially once again.

I struggled through Alan Liu piece From Reading to Social Computing. His technological analysis on how we got to today’s social computing and his explanation of social reading is beyond my paygrade, so ill have to take his word for it. There is something he says in the introduction that doesn’t sit well with me, however –“Social computing encourages literary scholars to remember and repurpose the long history of social writing, publishing, reading, and interpreting.” Is social computing, just a continuation of people sharing literature socially or is it something completely different and incomparable with the way we did things in the past? I feel that, for all its benefits, we could be massively underestimating the negative effect social computing can have on literature.

In a social computing manor, I searched Wikipedia for insights into the history of social writing. There wasn’t much to be found there, so I turned my query over to Google. The top result is a book by Tom Standage called – Writing on the Wall: Social Media – The First 2,000 Years. The description informs us that “Social media is anything but a new phenomenon” and goes on to give examples of how people in the past sharing information mirrors today’s social networks. Maybe so, but there is one fundamental difference between the past and now. In the past, we didn’t have much information about an author beyond his or her work. The work was what mattered first and foremost. Status and reputation came later.
Mysterious or unknown people often wrote words that led to revolutions or made us think differently. Nowadays there is anonymous social computing, but for the most part, we can easily find out way too much about who is writing, publishing, reading and interpreting literature. We now judge authors work increasingly with other aspects of their life and not just what they wrote.

Regardless, social computing is here to stay, and Liu thinks we should embrace/dissect/research it academically. For instance, he addresses why contemporary literary scholarship should take an interest in contemporary social computing: “If one loves literature, I think, one now has to be willing to go speculatively where the language of passionate life goes, especially among the young, who will carry on the cool literary adventure.” Being cool is great in all, but not if it’s for cool’s sake. Could it be that trying to be cool is our first real intention when engaging in some social computing? I fear that superior or lasting artistic merit is lost in the quick gratification social computing gives or worse encourages.

I agree with Liu in that “social computing and literary activity are both aspects of a single communicational phenomenon: the contemporary form of the human need to say something well (memorably, persuasively, movingly, beautifully, wittily, and so on) to someone else.” However, he then goes on to say that “Conceiving of such a unified field of literary and social communicational study will require significant methodological work.” Why does our need to say something well to someone else have to be such hard work? If what we are reading fits this criterion, then it’s just good writing – no matter who said it or how it comes to us.

The article concludes that social computing allows us to “seek knowledge and experience wherever it is vested and most easily accessed.” This is undeniably true- we can access knowledge like never before with computers. The danger with social computing is it gives us access to unknown worlds around literature too that maybe should remain unknown. Often this only shows us the messiness of human life and removes us from the work itself.

My favorite quote from this week’s readings comes from Alan Liu’s “From Reading to Social Computing”:

In essence, Facebook became a platform for character role-playing. It allowed students to study the play as if they were directors staging it in alternative medium. All the world, as it were, is not a wooden “O” but a digital Friend Wheel.

This metaphor contains multitudes. Dating from 2013, it inevitably dates the project and makes it impossible to replicate on the same terms: Liu refers to a Facebook feature that came and went like so many others it has offered over the years (I don’t remember the Friend Wheel; I hardly remember the social graph it once debuted, and never made use of it). Nevertheless, this one-off aspect captures something of the nature of a “great work” of art or literature.  In addition, Facebook is no longer the social network of choice for the student age group he was working with; and he describes his class’s use of the platform in a way that, according to Facebook’s guidelines, would surely be considered abuse of the platform.  In many ways, this makes Facebook perfect for such an experiment. Unlike Instagram – which was just getting started – Snapchat, the now-defunct Vine, or even Twitter, Facebook requires a primarily narrative-based creation and performance of personae (I have two accounts myself) for reasons surely examined by many other studies in social science, rhetorical theory, and psychology. The suspicion with which many users view it only encourages a less-than-absolutely-faithful reflection (as if this were possible) of who its users “are” in “meatspace.”

I imagine that this experiment not only enlivened Romeo and Juliet and brought it to life, but also must have enlivened the social networking experience altogether and brought these other issues to light for the participants. And, although it was probably a closed group, I love thinking of the potential “lurkers” watching the goings on and wondering, but unable to participate. Facebook, in Barthes’s terms, provides a fundamentally “writerly” experience of self, others, and social connections in which authority is decentralized; through posts, likes, and responses, readers and writers (users and friends) mutually build and interpret each other’s online selves (often through misreading). Like Liu’s other experiment with The Canterbury Tales and blogging, the social world of R&J has a remarkable affinity to today’s social networking platforms “even to the point that the rudeness, “flames,” baitings from “trolls,” and other apparent debasements and provocations of language typifying the extremes” of social networking have a performative, dramatic ethos. In ways seeming to build on Hayles’s use of Facebook as a pedagogical tool (“Hyper and Deep Attention, ”196), Liu’s use of Facebook also highlighted the reader’s role in (recon)constructing a literary text’s own voice and meaning: it “allowed the students to study the play as if they were directors staging it in an alternative medium.”  As Liu posits elsewhere in his essay, a “successful online reading environment would integrate social networking tools in a way that extends readers’ existing strategies.” Moreover, Liu reminds us that this approach is fundamentally orthodox: knowledge and experience are, as N. Katherine Hayles has suggested in How We Became Posthuman (1999), distributed phenomena . In the case of texts, Liu explains that these are accessed “through combinations of authors, documents, readers, and scholar-critics—that is, in the social networks of all of the above.”

Because I am no longer in the loop when it comes to typical classroom pedagogy in a literature course (as opposed to somewhat still-nascent interactive, technology-based pedagogy) I don’t know if Liu’s experiments with Facebook have been widely adopted. They would have to be adapted to the platform’s changing features and its stricter guidelines for the creation of accounts. I hope it has been adopted more widely, or—sooner rather than later—will be. Like the MLA Commons and other developments in crowd-sources peer review, which have not quite yet transformed—but promise to—the stale rigmarole of academic publishing, and with it the institutions of academic authority and tenure and promotion procedures, “it may be that social computing will change the whole paradigm of literary reading and research to make central the social environment of literature…scholarship, equipped with Web 2.0, becomes a fully social act.”  I wonder what will happen when “Web 3.0” arrives.